Stanford researchers coin the term foundation model

More than 150 Stanford researchers, organized as the new Center for Research on Foundation Models, published “On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models” on 16 August 2021, covering models such as BERT, GPT-3 and DALL-E and the risks they carry.

Why it mattered The term was widely adopted afterward, including in later negotiations over the EU AI Act, for systems trained broadly at scale and adapted to many tasks.